As the only Berkeley High School grad on the UC Berkeley football team, Lucas King has a perspective different from the rest of his 100-plus teammates.

For starters, his journey up Bancroft Avenue from the high school to the university has been one measured not by distance but by time, as in years. Forget about the road less traveled, King has taken a road strewn with obstacles, littered with potholes and staked with warning signs.

That's what it's like when you have attention deficit disorder and are trying to make a go of it at a prestigious university.

"He's had a hard road," his mother, Holly King, said. "He has ADD. He's had to struggle with that every day. Sometimes you have to hit bottom to get to the top. School has been tough. But he's a smart guy."

"He's a fighter," added his father, Tom King.

The 21-year-old linebacker was originally a walk-on after delaying his enrollment at Cal from the fall of 2009 to January 2010. He eventually earned a scholarship in 2010 but lost it in 2011 because of academic issues related to a lack of units passed rather than poor grade-point average. Focus and organization were the main culprits, his mother said.

"Coming here, playing football, it's definitely a challenge," King said, gazing out the window of the cafe at the International House on Piedmont Avenue. "It's a lot of work. If you fall behind, you can dig yourself a hole that's hard to get out of. That's what happened to me. I didn't want to disappoint people, which is what ended up happening."

He's back on the team for 2012, with his scholarship due to kick in once the fall semester begins this month. His academics are in order. Now all that remains is for the 6-foot-3, 235-pound outside linebacker to impress his coaches enough in training camp to earn some playing time.

If King gets on the field for the Bears this season, it will be an example of delayed gratification, considering that the last time he played in a real game was in 2008 as a Berkeley High Yellowjacket, earning Chronicle All-East Bay and All-Metro honors.

"It's been a long process," he said. "I feel it's time. I want to contribute. When I get to play in front of a true home crowd, it's going to be a surreal experience for me. I have memories of the stadium in certain seats. When we beat Oregon one year, we snuck down to the alumni seats."

That's because at St. Jerome Middle School in El Cerrito and at Berkeley High, King worked concession stands at the south end of Memorial Stadium to raise funds for his schools. He said his most vivid memories were of Cal defeating USC in triple overtime in 2003, when he was 12, and a game years later against Tennessee.

"When we played Tennessee ... the concession stand was near where the visitors sit," he said. "These Tennessee people said, 'Did you see the people in the trees?' It was culture shock for them that hippies in trees could stop a multimillion-dollar project."

King said his mother, who grew up in Berkeley, enjoys telling the story of driving down Bancroft toward Telegraph Avenue and into a cloud of tear gas to quell a protest one day around 1970 or '71.

"I was in my mom's VW," Holly King said. "I went to Holy Names High School (in Oakland). I was wearing my Holy Names uniform. It was pretty scary. It happened so fast. People were running to get away from the tear gas. It was just another day in Berkeley."

Some 40 years later, Holly King's son takes pride in how he turned his academic career around, with considerable help from Keiko Price, the football team's director of student-athlete development, meaning academics.

"I had to make up a lot of units," he said. "It was stressful at times. If I didn't do well, I was going to be dismissed from school, which would have been devastating."

Back in good academic graces and working hard on the football field, King values the rough-hewn road he traveled to get back on the Cal team - older, wiser and more appreciative of what he nearly lost.